My name is Allyson. I was born in 1996 and named by my math teacher mother’s fifth-grade students who she told to name me anything they wanted so long as they agreed. So, they had a vote. Allyson (spelled incorrectly: A-L-L-Y-S-O-N over the traditional A-L-I-S-O-N) narrowly won first place while Xena The-Warrior-Princess (middle name all hyphenated) finished a close second. I mean it finished a close second.
This right here is Indigo Tuesday. The name comes from a tattoo on my arm which reads “Goodbye, Blue Monday.” The image comes from Kurt Vonnegut’s illustration in his book “Breakfast of Champions”, which a lot of people have. The book and the tattoo I mean. The words Goodbye Blue Monday come from this:
“The motto of the Robo-Magic washing machine cleverly confused two separate ideas people had about Monday. One idea was that women traditionally did their laundry on Monday. Monday was simply washday, and not an especially depressing day on that account. People who had horrible jobs during the week used to call Monday ‘Blue Monday’ sometimes, though, because they hated to return to work after a day of rest. When Fred T. Barry made up the Robo-Magic Motto as a young man, he pretended that Monday was called ‘Blue Monday’ because doing laundry disgusted and exhausted women. The Robo-Magic was going to cheer them up. It wasn’t true, incidentally, that most women did their laundry on Monday at the time the Robo-Magic was invented. They did it any time they felt like it.
With the invention of the Robo-Magic washing machine, women could finally say goodbye to their blue Mondays forever. “Off to the bridge club while my Robo-Magic does the wash! GOODBYE BLUE MONDAY!”” –Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions.
Also in the book, a character named Henry LeSabre paints the phrase on a bomb about to be dropped on Germany, further misrepresenting the phrase.
“One time he got to paint a message on a five-hundred-pound bomb which was going to be dropped on Hamburg, Germany. This was it:
Goodbye Blue Monday.” –Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions
Indigo Tuesday is yet another twisted use of this phrase.
Goodbye, Blue Monday. Hello, Indigo Tuesday. Positivity and connection through poetry and short stories. I hope you read my words and share my feelings and think about the people and places in your life. I hope that the two of us together can make this a thing of positivity and light.
Thanks for reading, for learning to be human.
Indigo Tuesday 